Perhaps as many as 5,000 more people have been laid off since
March, said one former employee who was let go in April.

In March, HP employees began hearing that HP was planning on
laying off 30,000 people across all units, with ES hardest-hit.

Employees have been steadily leaving, too. This could be
hurting some of HP's contracts, like its Navy Marine Corps
Intranet/Next Generation Enterprise Network. The Navy
renewed its contract with HP in 2010 for $3.3 billion in a
five-year deal, but the Navy would rather end the relationship,
Wired reported at the time. "Over the past 10 months, over
70 employees have left the NMCI/NGEN contract. All for
higher-paying jobs, better jobs," said one former employee.

The HP ES team never felt integrated with the rest of HP.
When HP bought EDS, it just about doubled the size of HP. EDS had
139,500 workers and HP had 172,000.

The cost overruns that Meg Whitman complained about in March
were caused by "the HP side," an ES employee said. HP took over
the management of EDS's IT tools, like its telephone system. They
added staff to manage the tools and charged the extra staff back
to what used to be EDS. "Is it any wonder that HP ES's
costs rose 10% last fiscal year?"

A good chunk of the next round of layoffs could be coming
from a part of HP ES known as the Business Process Outsourcing
unit, sources at HP ES believe. HP has been talking about selling
the unit or shutting it down, our sources say. This unit lets big
companies hire HP to do tasks such as customer support, human
resources, payroll, and accounting. One employee said that
BPO had about 25,000 employees when HP bought EDS and is about
half that size now.

ES had a string of leaders—none of them with a clue,
employees complain. "HP ES was never managed properly.
Management never had proper direction from the top down.
Almost every 6-8 months, we would get an email about leadership
changes," one employee told us.

John Visentin was put in charge of ES last year. "He's
been so invisible it's just ridiculous," our source told us.
"Meg Whitman came out and said HP ES was HP's biggest problem
... that was in March. He made no statement at all … no emails,
nothing."